Craft.

The machine had been trying to kill Eddie Kline for nineteen years, and Eddie had responded by eating lunch beside it.

Ray Baird watched him unwrap a ham sandwich on the clean side of the yellow line. There was no clean side of the yellow line. There was the side with the moving equipment and the side with a man who had found somewhere to put a sandwich.

“You hear that?” Ray asked.

Eddie stopped chewing.

“What?”

Ray pointed through the guard. Beneath the steady roar of the paper line was a small irregular knock, familiar enough that he had noticed it before he could decide what it was.

“Bearing?” Eddie asked.

“Sounds like the coupling.”

Eddie looked at his sandwich, calculating whether the problem could wait until he got to the middle.

“Don’t get excited,” Ray said. “Call it in.”

They followed the shutdown procedure. Ray had spent fourteen years on that floor, long enough to know which noises belonged to the job and which meant somebody was about to have a worse one. He wasn’t an electrician or a millwright. He knew when to get one. This distinction had prevented several expensive events and one event that would have involved the permanent loss of Eddie’s sandwich hand.

Maintenance found the worn coupling. The line stopped for forty-six minutes.

At ten, their supervisor thanked them for catching it.

At eleven-fifteen, management told them the plant was closing.

The meeting took place in a room where a framed statement explained that the workforce was the company’s most valuable resource. Somebody had put a wheeled whiteboard in front of it. The board said TRANSITION.

Ray stood at the back beside Eddie. A man from corporate, whose shoes had never been asked to deal with this floor, explained demand, capacity, and a review of strategic alternatives. Ray understood each word. Together they appeared to mean the building was about to stop being their building.